English
Istanbul´s Pera Museum in Turkey exhibits the work of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for the first time ever. The exhibition, which is open until March 20 2011, has an extensive collection of works from the Gelman Collection, including the best self-portraits by Frida Kahlo and rare paintings by Rivera.
The exhibition consists of 40 paintings from the renowned collection by Gelman Twentieth century Mexican art, and includes the retrospective works by Frida Kahlo presented in Berlin and Vienna in 2010, so the curator Helga Prignitz-Poda.
The xhibition will also include side events that document the life and the historical moments that influenced the work of this important painter, by Salomon Grimberg, an expert on Mexican artists. Also, the program Viva la Revolución will be shown, with screenings of films on the Mexican Revolution.
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderon was born in Coyoacan, Mexico, in 1907. Her deeply personal and original painting , with a strong emotional and metaphorical content of her life, let the father of Surrealism André Breton consider her a spontaneous surrealist, a label that she refused by responding “I never painted my dreams, only I painted my own reality”.
Indeed, her life had been a chain of pain that lodged in her body until her death. In 1926 she suffered a traffic accident that left her with irreversible damage to the spine when a tube embedded in her hip and pelvis, which also left her sterile and unable to conceive children. This accident marked her life and the intensity of her work. She began painting during her convalescence and it required body efforts that set the color at that stage. Her paintings are portraits in dark tones, with rigid lines and conventional aesthetics.
Love marked freedom, passion and intensity of her work. She met Diego Rivera in 1927 when he returned to Mexico from Russia and began to paint murals in the Ministry of Education. She went to show him her paintings and he was interested in her work and in Frida. Two years later, when she was 22 and he 43 they got married.
Frida suffered several abortions that definitely frustrated her wish of motherhood and the pain passed on to her paintings. Due to her trip to the United States, the longing of her culture installed in her painting the popular and religious imagery.
Rivera´s constant infidelities in addition to abortions and pains of her body were the inspiration of her best works. The year 1937 is Frida’s most prolific period, her works Mi Nana y Yo, el Difunto Dimas, Mis Abuelos, Mis Padres y yo are among the most beautiful paintings in the world.
Although she was a member of the Communist Party and close to major communist intellectuals of her time, in 1937 she went by herself to look for coming exiled Leon Trotsky in Mexico, demonstrating her independence of thought and affection for her friends.
Nancy Guzman
Istanbul and the One Thousand and One Nights go together, so if you want to live the Passion of Frida through her paintings visit the Pera Museum, which is one of the most modern museums in Europe, and tour the city and enjoy a the in the apartments in Istanbul?
